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Showing Press in Substance Abuse and Incarceration

Established around the country in the 1980s as an alternative to regular prison, the so-called "shock camps" got mixed reviews and several states dropped them. New York kept three camps going with a model they say is effective and cutting down the rate of repeat offenses and saving money.Read More

New York, New York: The Correctional Association of New York (CA), the State's oldest criminal justice organization, has released the report Treatment Behind Bars: Substance Abuse Treatment in New York State Prisons, 2007-2010 (download, 2 MB), the first-ever comprehensive review of the State's prison-based substance abuse treatment programs.Read More

“We are encouraged by the Governor’s reference to Rockefeller Drug Law reform in his State of the State speech,” stated Robert Gangi, Executive Director of the Correctional Association of New York. “He has certainly restored the issue to a central place in his legislative agenda, which is an important and positive step. Yet we are cautious about the final outcome and whether the Governor’s statement will actually lead to what should be the ultimate policy goal: meaningful restoration of sentencing discretion to judges in all drug cases. Only then will the State achieve as much as $280 million in savings annually, and establish a fair and sensible way of adjudicating drug cases”Read More

On Saturday, Mr. O’Donoghue was part of a petition drive and education campaign to repeal the Rockefeller Drug Laws. Enacted in 1973, New York’s Rockefeller drug laws penalized some first-time drug offenders more severely than murderers. Read More

Ninety percent of the people confined in New York’s prisons under these mandatory sentencing statutes are African-American or Latino, although research shows that the majority of drug users and sellers are white.Read More

Now, two new reports, by The Sentencing Project and Human Rights Watch, have turned a critical spotlight on law enforcement’s overwhelming focus on drug use in low-income urban areas. These reports show large disparities in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, despite roughly equal rates of illegal drug use.Read More